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The dying throes of an exploding star have created a spectacular nebula as an early warning sign of its imminent demise.

A new image taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the beginning of the death throes of a star that will explode and become a supernova in 100,000 years, says a spokesperson from the Chandra Observatory.

The combined X-ray and optical image of the star, whose powerful winds have created the gaseous Crescent Nebula, is one of only a few dozen observations of pre-supernova events.

Although only one-thousandth the age of our Sun, the star HD 192163 is already on its way to a supernova explosion, one of the most violent occurrences in the cosmos.

Initially the star expanded to become a red giant, blasting out much of its mass in a stellar wind. Then, after just 200,000 years, the intense radiation from the exposed, hot inner layer began ejecting gas at 5 million km/hr.

The high-speed, gaseous winds from the inner layer combined with the earlier stellar wind to create a dense shell around the star.

The force of the collision created two shock waves: one that moved outwards from the dense shell to create a filamentary structure (in green), and one that moved inward to produce a bubble of million degree Celsius X-ray emitting gas (in blue). The brightest X-ray emission shows hot gas evaporating matter from the shell.

The startling image will enable astronomers to determine the mass, energy, and composition of the gaseous shell around the pre-supernova star.

After its initial expansion the star will briefly become extraordinarily bright as it reaches supernova, before ending up a tiny fraction of its original size as a neutron star or a black hole.